[dragonwriter]

> How about the rampant false claims from various health officials and the WHO that masks didn't work in the very beginning of the pandemic.

That... wasn't the claim.

The claim was that people shouldn't stockpile masks for use beyond the circumstances in which they were recommended, because such additional use did not provide additional protective benefit.

This was roughly contemporaneous with guidance that most people should eliminate all non-essential contact with people outside their household. Masking for essential interactions was recommended by the same people advising against buying masks more generally.

> ...and this lie was intentional to protect mask stockpiles for healthcare workers.

It wasn't a lie, and preserving stocks for frontline workers and their essential interactions was an overtly cited part of the rationale, alongside the lack of additional benefit from superfluous masking.

> How about the initial censorship of the outbreak on social media and news media, on the grounds that the "fear-mongering" about an outbreak in China was racist?

That didn't happen.

> How about the labelling by the news media of the initial travel bans as racist?

The initial US travel bans, instituted after substantial domestic community spread was known and after substantial spread in lots of other foreign places that were not targeted by the bans was also known were, if not racist per se, more political posturing than public health.

> How about health officials refusing to test anyone who hadn't personally travelled to China for months after the virus had been observed in the US.

How is that a lie? Whether or not it (or the actual limit on testing, which was more nuanced) was the optimum way of managing limited testing resources may be a valid debate, but it's not a lie.

[3np]

The WHO claims/guidances could absolutely be interpreted as such. Here's from 2020-04 when WHO changed their stance.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/10/8298906...

Sweden may be seen as a bit of an oddball but either way the head of the national public health agency was consistent in saying masks did not provide any benefits for individuals pretty far into the pandemic.

https://www.bild.de/bild-plus/politik/ausland/politik-auslan... (paywall)

https://nyheter24.se/nyheter/944114-tegnell-om-varfor-munsky...

Not mentioned by the GP, but what was up with anything resembling a lab-leak theory getting the "unquestionably fake news" treatment for months?

I have not done any extensive digging into the vaccines myself and can't with good conscience say I'm well-informed. It still seems to me that the risk-trade-off is strongly in favor for getting vaccinated. Even so, I have full understanding for people who now have 0 trust in the public narrative. It's clear that there has been (still ongoing, I assume) a strong propaganda campaign that has at times been using misinformation and censorship (if you count deleting/shadowbanning social media content as censorship), involving governments, traditional news-media and social media. If the narrative around the effectiveness and risks of the vaccine holds, why do this?

[blub]

The WHO, CDC, RKI, etc were all telling people not to wear medical masks and the press was happily parroting this information while the Korean and Chinese CDC were recommending the exact opposite. Not only were they doing that, they were also gaslighting those that pointed to e.g. the Chinese wearing masks and additionally made those that had the foresight to buy FFP2+ masks feel guilty for taking away the supplies of medical professionals. Never mind the immense failure of Western governments of outsourcing most of their mask production to China (which promptly banned exports) and not stockpiling PPI.

Some European countries were so stupid, that they donated hundreds of thousands of masks from their own supplies at the beginning of the pandemic and then ran out of masks for their own medical personnel.

The actions of all those organisation advising against masks were evil and stupid. People saw through their excuses and bought all the quality masks anyway. The rest was bought by the Chinese and sent back home, resulting in an almost completely empty market for quality masks last year.

I hope the likes of the CDC are never able to fix their reputation. Nobody ever apologised, nobody lost their jobs over this.

[dqpb]

The claim that masks don’t help was absolutely an early claim spread widely throughout US media.

The motivation may have been to prevent stockpiling, but the messaging was that masks don’t help. I remember it clearly.

[albedoa]

> The claim was that people shouldn't stockpile masks for use beyond the circumstances in which they were recommended, because such additional use did not provide additional protective benefit.

That is simply and verifiably false. This is a direct quote from an executive director of the WHO health emergencies program:

> There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-masks-r...

Literally the first google result for "WHO masks don't work". There are plenty more after that. From the WHO's guidance published on April 6, 2020:

> there is currently no evidence that wearing a mask (whether medical or other types) by healthy persons in the wider community setting [...] can prevent them from infection with respiratory viruses, including COVID-19

You can speculate or demonstrate that the motives behind the claim did not match the claim itself. But to say that it wasn't the claim is flatly wrong.

[vernie]

> That... wasn't the claim.

That did appear to be the claim in Fauci's 60 Minutes interview. It was a pretty colossal messaging fuckup and damaged Fauci's credibility and trustworthiness early in the game.

[mcguire]

You are right, many epidemiologists and related experts did assert that masks would not be useful to fight coronavirus. And they were wrong.

On the other hand, if it's a "colossal messaging fuckup" and damages "credibility and trustworthiness", then you pretty much have to give up on the whole 'science' thing entirely.

They were under the mistaken impression that coronaviruses were spread by large droplets produced by symptomatic individiuals---in which case social distancing and washing your hands would be as effective as masks, and the previous history (and current experience) says that convincing people to use masks correctly and consistently is very difficult. Further, having people stock up on masks like they were stocking up on toilet paper would mean that those who couldn't get along without them would be SOL.

Then it turned out that coronavirus could be transmitted as an aerosol, asymptomatically, meaning that social distancing and handwashing, while useful, were a lot less useful. Hence, masks.

But if you are expecting science to produce a single, correct, consistent TRUTH on demand, you are going to be disappointed. In fact, you're probably better off sticking with The_Donald memes, since they're all of the same quality.

[nyolfen]

i will begin this by saying that i am vaccinated and wear a mask. the CDC misled americans about the efficacy of masks specifically to reduce demand so that medical pros could get them. it's one thing to ask and another to straight up lie[1]. when an institution literally admits it is not truthful, that it is operating on some level where you must parse their motivations and countervailing evidence to determine whether they will give you correct advice, why should it be a surprise that people don't trust them?

this doesn't even get into the fact that fauci personally approved funding for GoF coronavirus research at the WIV, a fact which he has still not even acknowledged. there are many, many other reasons to distrust the CDC, but these are the ones that i found most personally flagrant.

[1] https://www.thestreet.com/video/dr-fauci-masks-changing-dire...

[vernie]

The fuckup wasn't that we didn't know as much about the virus a year ago than we do today, but that by Fauci's admission the messaging to discourage mask use was adopted to avoid PPE shortages for healthcare workers. That's not "the whole 'science' thing" that's just bad comms.

To be clear I was fine with saving masks for healthcare workers and maybe there wasn't a better way to do that against the backdrop of people going apeshit in the paper goods aisle, but the point still stands.